I love these women, this sassy trio of honeys calling themselves Saffire. They sometimes gently poke and prod at societal ills and at other times, smash them with a hammer. Whatever they do, they always do it smiling.

But not for much longer, as they’re retiring, performing their last concert Nov. 9—after 22 years. While that might sound like a short career for a blues group, these gals started as middle-agers.

I’ve interviewed Ann Rabson (the piano player, on the right) and Gaye Adegbalola (the Grace Jones-looking leader of the group, who flashes her gospel roots with her powerful voice and plays rhythm guitar). Listening to their music, Saffire might come off as brash and uncompromising, but talking to them one-on-one, they’re refreshingly approachable.

On stage, Saffire talks nasty, giggling at the same jokes night after night as if they’d just thought them up in the van en route to the gig. By design, Gaye’s raunchy show staples like “Silver Beaver” and “Bitch With a Bad Attitude,” or Andra’s feature song “Lightning (In These Thunder Thighs)” crack up the women and embarrass the men they dragged to the show.

What I most like about Saffire is their humble attitude off the stage and the way they make huge efforts to perform authentic blues in the mold of the masters. Blues isn’t just a means to an act for Saffire; it’s their way of paying homage to Bessie Smith, Big Mama Thornton, and Koko Taylor, all of which Gaye references in her singing style at one point or another. They’re students of the blues, and you get the idea the roots are just as important as the fully flowered songs.

When you talk to  Ann—who plays a pretty mean boogie-woogie piano for a guitar player who first picked up blues keyboards at 35, clearly working very hard at it—she kinda “oh pshaws” away her abilities. Andra Faye’s upright bass might be taller than she is, but her singing and playing anchors the band and gives Saffire its trademark acoustic sound. Andra also tosses in some country flair, and has been known to go off on an occasional Patsy Cline tangent during the show.

In the old blues tradition, they sing political songs (notice I didn’t say politically correct songs, heh) and can put up two solid hours of nonstop entertainment with their schtick. Up and down the east coast, the NPR-loving, ex-folkie coffeehouse crowd loved them, but as blues musicians and as overall performers, their act suits audiences of any color or political bent wherever they go—except maybe the straightest-laced Glenn Beck fans, who probably were pretty put off by the whole Saffire phenomenon.

Saffire’s a one of a kind, an American original. Part blues, part folk, part vaudeville. All good. Thanks for keeping it real, ladies. We salute you.

Giving my man Albert King a little love this week and doing my best to fulfill that unrealized dream of making embarrassingly bad college radio through the use of my smartpen.

Go full screen and have yourself a Cold Shot of epic proportions!

And still other times, such as this week, we share discoveries that might not be new—but they’re new to us.

Not long ago, cruising Bomp’s spam of the week, this tasty little CD came up for grabs: Bo Diddley’s Drive By: Tales From the Funk Dimension 1970-73, compiling tracks from four lost classic Chess albums issued in the early 1970s and available on—get this—Australian import.

Are you kidding me? After buying roughly 8,000 albums and being graced by probably as many promo copies, record titles alone rarely—if ever—sway an album purchase. But with a name like that, even in these cash-strapped days, it sounded just too good to pass up. Blues-funk of the early 1970s can be fantastic, as the old guard like Bo Diddley, Albert King, and Buddy Guy latched on to the urban sounds coming out of Chicago blues clubs and the second wave of the Memphis Stax soul sound led by Black Moses himself. So Mojo laid his money down.

Diddley was one of those geniuses, like James Brown or Booker T. Jones—or Prince, for that matter—who not only innovated his own rhythms and sound, but could also integrate his music into the current style. And he sounds go-oo-od in a funk mode, doing an oddly appropriate-for-2009 Hendrix style rock blues with the economics-themed “Bad Trip,” and a tasty little Diddley-style reinterpretation of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Down On the Corner.” He also sweetly covers CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” in a country-gospel mode.

But he wasn’t just aping the popular artists of the day; Diddley updated his early self-named dance tracks with “Bo Diddley-Itis,” and does some flat-out gospel soul a la Wilson Pickett with “Infatuation.” And like James Brown did at the time, he does a little street-level social commentary with “Stop The Pusher,” and takes the Marvin Gaye mountaintop view in “Pollution.”

It’s all blues-based rock with fat, funky bass lines. Stuff that, if it doesn’t move your groove thang, have someone check for a pulse. All the 20 tracks—and I don’t say this lightly—are fantastic, with “Funky Fly” the greatest jam of the lot. Oh, all right, I’ll concede that the song “Shut Up, Woman” and its rantings probably aren’t very appropriate for these times, and even if they were Diddley definitely goes overboard with poor-at-best Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters impressions in the same song. But the rest of it’s totally worth the investment. Bottoms up.

As a solo artist, Reddick’s put out four albums on Northern Blues, but I first came in contact with this monster—and I mean a big personality as well as a big talent—while he was playing with the Sidemen, who released the album Rattlebag in 2001. It’s been eight years, and the record still resonates with me. Part of that can be attributed to the gritty, perfectly blues-appropriate attitude, and partly because the “vintage sound” of the production rewinds the tape back to 1950s and 1960s style blues recordings, when tape was king and little imperfections in the recording made the blues sound more authentic.

Whatever mojo he’s got working, it sure sounds good. I leave you with the cuts from that album “Sleepy John Estes” and “One Way Trip,” and hope it inspires you to invest more bandwidth in checking out this solid blues cat, who also at times flashes a country-folk bent.

If Mojo don’t love you baby, then grits ain’t groceries, eggs ain’t poultries, an Mona Lisa was a man. Yeah, that’s right, that’s what my man the late James Booker used to sing in “All Around The World” while wearing that sexy eye patch with the star on it.

It just stuns me that more people don’t appreciate this New Orleans great, he’s a footnote, an afterthought in the hall of fame of American pianists (not just blues or jazz players, I mean all-time greats). Heck, he’d weave classical motifs into his blues, like in “Gitanarias” and the “Black Minute Waltz.” From the sounds of things, he took these musical side streets just for the sport of it.

And of course early in his career he played a little B-3 and did the James Brown thang on cuts like “Beale Street Popeye.”

But he was at his best playing cuts like “Something You Got” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” in the classic New Orleans doctor-professor impresario style. His complex left hand rhythms complemented the furious, ornate melodies coming out of the right, making most other blues cats look like ham-fisted piano-beaters. Dig yourself some live “Tico Tico/Papa Was a Rascal” and listen to the interplay between his steady left and deadly right.

Lifestyle-wise, Booker was a wreck. Professionally, he worked with all the New Orleans greats in the blues, R&B and jazz realm, and had every bit the resume of his peers Professor Longhair, his good friend Dr. John, Art Neville and Allen Toussaint. In the mid-’70s, he mentored a young Harry Connick, Jr., who like Booker was identified as a musical prodigy at an early age.

Yet for some odd reason–maybe because his recorded catalog was spotty, sporadic, and not well-publicized–he’s considered at best an obscure cult figure. A true indie musician who toiled on the margins of the music biz.

Until Warner Bros. or whomever (Rounder and Concord Records, you reading this?) decides to put his playing in proper historical perspective with a gorgeously produced box set, however, it’s up to you and me to make sure the world doesn’t forget about this singularly American icon, James Booker.

Now go to Half.com or your favorite (legitimate) download site and buy up all the CDs you can find, and play the living crap out of them. While I don’t claim to know everything, I do know for certain that James Booker’s piano playing is a major waystation on the long path to musical enlightenment we’re all attempting to navigate. If that ain’t true, baby, grits really ain’t groceries.

While some folks would call that the very definition of a blues purist, I came to realize it was just me being a blues dickhead. Some white guys can bring just as much blues game, I now admit (but not Clapton, yet).

Still, I have a hard time enjoying much blues outside the classics, despite trying to keep an open mind on the matter. Lately–like, say the last five years–I’ve become a 1960s garage rock junkie, collecting as many obscurities in that realm as I can afford. Sifting through that stuff, I can testify that there are some smokin’ renditions of Bo Diddley and Muddy to be heard in garage milieu, performed with more joy and respect than some of Muddy’s peers who were out on the touring circuit at the time, doing pat run-throughs of “Hoochie Coochie Man” just to please the crowd and getting the college kids to yell dope-fueled “YEAHHHs” and “AMENs” between phrases.

Appreciation of this garage stuff led me to the present-day Deep Blues folks I often write about in this space (Black Keys, Black Diamond Heavies, Black Smokers, and a lot of other bands who don’t have “black” in their names), as well as…Al Kooper. This monumental rock organist played on Dylan’s seminal electric recordings (”Like A Rolling Stone”), and formed (but soon was kicked out of, before “Spinning Wheel” and their other super hits) Blood, Sweat & Tears.

His blues, played in the Blues Project and in 1968 with Mike Bloomfield (Paul Butterfield, Electric Flag) and Stephen Stills under the moniker “Super Session,” is pretty freakin’ righteous. Drugs were involved; in fact Stills literally wouldn’t have been in the picture had they not been, as Bloomfield supposedly checked out of the recording date to score some horse and get high.

But 40 years later, the stuff is the boss. The Super Session studio LP definitely is worth checking out for any rock fan who likes Cream and that late-1960s heavy rock blues. It’s an underrated, somewhat obscure gem of quite high quality. I’m with these people who say it’s mind-bendingly great and the track “His Holy Modal Majesty” alone smokes the Grateful Dead in its acid-tripping prime.

But I’m not here today to talk about the studio stuff. Better than that was the group’s lesser-known 1968 live material, which I adore. The group had done Fillmore West shows, which came out as a movie titled The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. A 1968 performance at the Fillmore East, unearthed a few years ago and released as Al Kooper & Michael Bloomfield: Fillmore East: The Lost Concert Tapes is in my opinion, the best of the supergroup’s output.

Considering it’s white folks playing the blues, it’s pretty great stuff. Check out the introduction to the set, leading into “One Way Out.” Then there’s his Bloomfield’s introduction of the young unknown Johnny Winter, leading into “It’s My Own Fault.” These guys could blues-ify anything and they did–including the sleepy, cheezy pop single “59th St. Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” just for the sport of it.

Classic blues. Rivaling Muddy, Elmore, B.B., Buddy. And it took Mojo’s train many years to arrive at that station. But don’t you agree?

Betcha Didn’t Know finds McClain, a singer who had some downs earlier in life (luckily, the last couple decades have been mostly up), in fine fettle, belting his deep “red clay” Louisiana soul in front of a full horn section.

Definitely worthy of being featured as the album’s centerpiece, the title track is a midtempo jazz piece that showcases McClain’s vocal chops. At 66 the guy still has total control over his vast dynamic range. There’s blues all over the record, but Mighty Sam infuses it with more contemporary southern soul this time around.

Old fans will wilt over “Just Want to Be,” a gospel-soul love song of the kind that dominated the charts in the early ’70s; McClain still does it better than most people on the planet. Speaking of ’70s material, the guy’s got a love for the funk and takes every opportunity he can to throw it down, e.g. “Funky Love” and “Can’t Stop the Funk,” a live performance with which we’ll leave you.

]]> http://popdose.com/mojos-cold-shot-mighty-sam-mcclain-betcha-didnt-know/feed/ 2 http://popdose.com/mojos-cold-shot-koko-taylor-1928-2009/ http://popdose.com/mojos-cold-shot-koko-taylor-1928-2009/#comments Thu, 11 Jun 2009 15:30:05 +0000 Mojo Flucke http://popdose.com/?p=20469 You never forget your first love. As such, I will never forget Koko Taylor. I forget lots of other stuff. Spelunking to the craggy areas of my memory where it’s dark, dank, and the stalactites and stalagmites grow, I cannot for the life of me remember what drove me to buy my first blues CDs upon entering college in the late 1980s.

(I don’t know for sure, but I am thinking it was because I liked the music of the dumb Ralph Macchio movie, Crossroads. Ironically, if that was it, it was the harmonica solo by the old blues dude in the big “cuttin’ contest” scene that pushed me toward blues–ironic because the old sage was harmonica-syncing to the J. Geils Band and Magic Dick doing “Whammer Jammer,” and not some good old Jimmy Reed or Sonny Boy Williamson stuff.)

No matter what drove me, a Koko Taylor greatest-hits compilation was one of the CDs I plucked out of the used bin upon cashing in more than 1,000 cassettes for store credit. With no idea whether or not Koko Taylor was a man or woman, I dropped it in my bag–the name sounded bluesy to me. Her signature “Wang Dang Doodle” was one of the cuts on the CD, here live with Little Walter in 1967:

She was a blues belter, a powerful singer. She shredded notes with her voice, enrapturing us and encompassing the pure, visceral power and emotion that encompasses the blues. She was the Joe DiMaggio of the blues landscape, bagging nominations and awards for practically everything she recorded. She made men of the man’s, man’s, man’s world of the blues sound inferior.

She performed until last May, maybe off her “A” game in the end but representing the blues genre with grace, that gold-toothed smile winning ‘em over to the bitter end. She died June 3 in her Chicago home, following complications from gastrointestial surgery in May. And Koko Taylor was my first love in the blues. Rest in peace, queen of the blues. You kicked ass, and we will never forget you.

But is it Blues with a capital B? What about Zeppelin playing covers of 1930s tunes, or Mick Jagger barking out sweet papa Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain?” I mean, come on, really.

If you’d asked me that question 15 years ago, I’d spit on your shoes and ask how dare you desecrate the hallowed names of Magic Sam and Buddy Guy and Junior Wells and Muddy and Broonzy and Jimmy Reed by putting people like Jimmy Page and Mick Jagger in the same sentence. I’d invoke the spirit of Big Mama Thornton and have her chase you in your dreams  at night, wielding her crowbar.

That was then, and this is now. It’s not that I’ve done a 180-degree turn, but an acknowledgment that:

• So many legends have passed away since that time, and it seems that more and more white blues lovers are keeping the art form alive;
• I’ve gone through deep explorations of obscure 1960s garage rock, much of it including loving, and, well, good covers of Muddy and Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed; and
• The latest blues revival—Deep Blues, as performed by the likes of the Black Keys and Black Diamond Heavies—sounds more primitive and raw, more like the original blues than polished stuff from the Yardbirds, etc. of the classic rock era ever did.

And I’ve also softened a little. Back then, to me ZZ Top and Aerosmith played rock, not blues. There was a Chinese wall in between the two. Now, I think the spirit of those two bands—as well as that group Mick Jagger fronts—is more blues-oriented than rock.

Other groups might not be blues groups, per se, but in my opinion could play a good blues song (not just a rock song with a few blues chords). So yes, we can call some white rockers’ music blues. But please, let’s be a little judicious with the term. Anyone who calls what Eric Johnson does “blues” is itchin’ for a fight. Also, I’m still not sold on most of Clapton’s catalog outside of his Mayall and Dominos work. But that’s a discussion for another day.

In the meanwhile, I’ll leave you with a couple Procol Harum (pictured below) blues-like cuts, “Wish Me Well” and “Whisky Train,” which to me indicate Gary Brooker & Co.’s understanding of the milieu. Just don’t call ‘em a blues band.

He still plays out–mostly in New England, where he makes his home nowadays. In fact, I and fellow Popdoser Ed Murray caught him at The Village Trestle in Goffstown earlier this month, where he rang in his 70th birthday after the gig.

Here’s a fantastic 10 minute shot of Luther in his solo rockin’ prime of the 1980s, done from a Cambridge, Mass. club. You can hear the Mississippi and N’Awlins in his voice in the interview part, but the music is pure urban blues along Memphis and Chicago lines, with Muddy and B.B. King sounds coming out of his guitar. (Bonus: The video also features awesome Pinetop Perkins footage, as he performs with Luther; that guy, by the way, is still pumping out blues in his 90s, and last I heard, was still pretty sharp):

So there you go. Still kicking and entertaining folks, Luther’s a living guitar legend, the kind of which we’re losing left and right as they all get to be that age. Go see him and support him out there on the road, the guy’s got blues running in his veins and still brings it, albeit with a few more slower, downhome selections mixed in that he used to. After the show, meet him, buy a couple CDs, shake his hand, get an autograph. He’s good like that.

Here’s a double-shot of music, “Doin’ The Sugar, Too,” the title track from his 1984 Bullseye Blues album, and “Got To Find A Way,” another title track–this one from his 1998 Telarc album.